Daniel Mason (1) (1976–)

North Woods is difficult to categorize. Is it a novel? Is it a collection of short stories? Is it a family saga? An environmental novel? The genealogy of a house over five centuries? A murder mystery? A ghost story? A gay romance? A social critique? My answer: All of the above and more.

All of the stories are in some way connected to one New England house and to the land surrounding it. It begins when a pair of lovers flee north from their Puritan community, at first hunted, but eventually show more settling peacefully on a plot of land that seems like paradise. Mason ingeniously uses the cabin they build as the framework of the book, tracing a succession of inhabitants through the centuries: a retired British soldier with a passion for apple cultivation; his two spinster daughters; a painter seeking solace who corresponds with a poet friend; a catamount; a ghost; a beetle bringing Dutch Elm Disease; an artists' colony; a madman; an anthropologist; and many, many more, all connected to one another by blood, land, house, memory. Every story is fascinating, and every story makes you want to connect the links between them. When you do, you realize that Mason has something important to say about time, place, nature, and the human condition. We may think that we are the masters of our world, but North Woods reminds us that we are, always, a small organic part of it.

Mason's book is beautifully written, brilliantly plotted, observant, sensitive to detail. And as so many professional reviewers have stated, it is simply magical. North Woods is a lament for all that we have lost but also a prayer for the time to come. I haven't read anything in years that comes close to it in originality and in its ability to make me not only feel but think. It's one of those rare books that, when I completed it, I felt I needed to rest awhile and then start it all over again. It's going to be difficult for any other book to nudge it from the top on this year's reading list. show less

North Woods is the story of one small plot of land, and upon it a yellow house, that takes us through centuries of time. The story begins with a young Puritan couple who escape their Plymouth colony and build the foundation of a small stone home in western Massachusetts, in the middle of a woods. Next, we are introduced to a woman who has been captured by Indians and deposited at this very same home, now owned by an elderly woman, who we learn is the female half of that Puritan couple. From show more there, and moving forward in time, we meet Charles Osgood, a veteran of the French and Indian War (and eventually the Revolutionary War), who has an obsession with apples, and develops an apple orchard on the property, along with his daughters Mary and Alice. And then we move on with the sisters’ story, and so on and so forth, throughout the centuries, until we arrive at present day. All the while, the house (whose condition ebbs and flows) is silent witness to its occupants. We begin to learn somewhat early in the book that some of the inhabitants of the house remain there past their deaths. It’s a tribute to Mason’s writing skill that all of this gels and feels believable. Nature is present throughout the book, with a nod to the damage we do to our surroundings, but in the end we hope for nature’s resurrection.

Told in many forms: narrative, epistolary, poetry, medical reports, etc. Might sound confusing, but it works! Beautifully written. Loved this book. show less

This is the most wonderful book and will definitely be in my top ten for this year - if not at the number one slot. It tells the story of a plot of land over the years from the time it is first used by a couple of young lovers running away to some indeterminate time in the future. A cabin is built which is then turned into a house and it is there that we meet the people who inhabit the land.

She looked then much as she does now: a clean facade of lemon yellow, with white shutters on the show more windows and a tall black door. A home of perfect symmetry, were it not for the ell on her left flank. In the dooryard, we planted the sapling that would one day grow into the noble elm that now stands forty feet and gives us shade in summer.
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We meet Osgood who becomes an apple breeder, his twin daughters who fall foul of jealousy and kill, painters, men who love each other, families and sometimes lone men all who are attracted to the place for its trees. Told through letters, self-penned stories, news articles, photos, footnotes and in one case psychiatric notes, the story goes round and round with future house holders hearing the ghosts of the house's past. And the land? It is cleared, becomes overgrown, cleared and becomes overgrown again and again in a never ending cycle but what does change are the plants that grow there. Because it isn't only people that move onto the land but also diseases, so we see Dutch Elm disease and Ash dieback amongst others. The description of the sex of a dutch elm disease beetle is so well described and accurate with a little anthropomorphism thrown in.

The description of seeds blowing landwards off a ship that has moored and dumped its ballast is fantastic and all told as footnotes for no one ever sees this process.

On landing, the ballast is removed and dumped into the harbor. Much of it - the stones, the shells, the beads, the spectacles - sinks to the bottom of the bay. But the seeds, many of the seeds, enough of the seeds, rinsed loose of their swadling earth, are freed into the breakers and float to shore.

It is warm; within weeks, they have germinated, begun to grow, to flower to set seed of their own.

Then, one by one, and by the millions, they make their way west.
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So, just like people, nature is constantly on the move. It has always been changed by humans and humans by it.

There is also the wild cat, the catamount, that keeps making an appearance. Once native to the land but eventually only there as a hunted and stuffed ornament on a desk, it does eventually break free and possibly kill someone who had undesirable ideas for the land - a touch of magic or folkloric happenings that sometimes survive through storytelling.

I did have to work quite hard to keep up with the book, the dates are not stated so you have to work out roughly what era you are in and keep track of the ghosts circling around. It tells the history of a small plot of land, not of the people who were there before the settlers, but from then on and it is fascinating. It is succession illuminated and a message to us all that it will continue even if the climate and therefore the plants change. The forest and the trees are everything and witness it all.

New Words

I often come across new words so here is one for this book

She drummed her fingers thoughtfully agaist her cheek, and registered, deep within her belly, a borborygmic protest against her gluttony.
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Definition - a rumbling or gurgling noise made by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines. show less

So much to admire, and yet... Somber, meticulous writing in stately rhythms; imagery by turns gorgeous (when spring finally comes, "Harp strings of light broke through the nave") and appalling ("He had never seen such a scream, teeth glittering in the crimson mouth" of a dead man whose jaw has been blown off). Mason sucks you in and puts you right there, in an isolated, freezing church among the dead, the maimed and the dying soldiers, amputating, sewing, draining, bandaging. The show more introverted, awkward young medical student Lucius learns to cope under the direction of the lone nurse, a rifle-toting nun called Margarete, left to tend 60 desperately ill men when the winter, the lice, typhus and the stench of gangrene has killed or driven away the other doctors and nurses. And... you know where this goes, right? He falls in love with Margarete. And in the chaos of war, they lose each other, he spends much of the rest of the story trying to find her again. But their love story, which is perhaps reminiscent of the grandiose romance of Dr Zhivago (a novel and movie I loathe), simply doesn't come to life. I couldn't tell if this was intentional on the writer's part: is it because Lucius, though marked by his medical school teachers as one who has "an unusual aptitude for for perception of things that lie beneath the skin," has difficulty in actual relationships, so a rich love is something he can't quite have? He is obsessed with medicine, with the mechanics and functions and ways it all can go wrong, and so when he thinks he is in love, it's similarly clinical. While I was curious about how this would end, and because so much of the writing was quite wonderful, I kept reading but I didn't really *care* how it ended, and the resolution was just that: an ending. It does close with some hope for Lucius, that perhaps his carapace has cracked a bit, that he might go on to engage with the world, with its beauties and it sufferings, in a more meaningful way.

A frequently beautiful, vivid, powerful read, but marred by an emotional lack that keeps it from breaking your heart. show less